Temporal louder/instable tinnitus - anyone?

Hey everyone,

I’m a 30 year old guy from Sweden and I’ve had tinnitus since I was 17. It was caused by my moped at the time which had a broken tailpipe and was very loud. One day when I stepped off it I had a hissing/ringing high pitched sound in my head (or equal in both ears, I'd say around 10-13kHz). I habituated fairly quickly to the sound and have lived without much irritation from it ever since, even though I can hear it pretty much in any environment, I can usually ignore it easily. Even when I had a period of severe anxiety problems in my early twenties the tinnitus didn’t seem to affect, or be affected by this, which makes me pretty sure that it is solely caused by the exposure to loud noise that I had. Some other details about it is that it increases momentarily if I bite down my teeth hard, or if I move my jaw in an extreme manner. Also, a thing that I think separate me from many other tinnitus sufferers is that I find it easiest to deal with when I’m somewhere quite. It’s if my brain thinks it’s more difficult to deal with the tinnitus sound simultaneously as dealing with other sound input from outside my head. This is especially true when I have my loud periods. Because of this, sleeping has never been a problem for me.

I have regularly been going to concerts and night clubs without almost never having any problems, sometimes using earplugs when it’s been very loud, but most of the time without. Sometimes (maybe 5-10 times per year) my tinnitus (smilingly randomly but sometimes after loud noise exposure) enters what I call an ”unstable state”. This usually lasts for a few hours up to 2 days, but then goes away and the tinnitus settles where it was beforehand.

A while ago I had an accident with my stereo receiver. I won’t go into the technical details of it, but the short story is that all of a sudden the volume turned to max while I was sitting infront of the speakers, facing them. I don’t know how loud it was in dB’s, but it was loud to the point that my heart started pumping rapidly as I quickly turned the volume dial down again. My ears didn’t hurt at first and my tinnitus seemed unaffected. After about two days however i entered a pretty severe unstable state. Now, after two weeks, it still hasn’t settled even though it’s gradually become a little bit better, in a two step forward, one step back kind-of-way.

Now I’m a little scared, since I’ve never experienced an unstable state this long before, that it won’t go away. I want to ask if anyone else here has a simliar kind of tinnitus to mine, recognize this unstable state that I’m talking about, and how long it’s been going on for you at longest?

I’ve made an image below to show more precise how I experience my tinnitus in what I call the unstable state.



The orange line is my ”baseline”. This is the tinnitus I have that is always there and that I have properly habituated to. When I enter the ”unstable state” I start having distinguished hissings on top of my baseline. These are almost the same frequency but a little bit louder and are only small ”shots” of hissings firing for 1-2 seconds. This is as you can imagen very annoying and way harder to habituate to then the fixed, stable sound of the baseline. For some reason these shots of sound never fire in both ears at the same time but is either just in one ear or flickers back and forth between left and right. This is contrary to the baseline which is always centered ”inside” my head.

 

Hey Phillip I think what you call unstable state may be what most call spikes. It's common for it to occur after loud noise exposure. You really should wear ear plugs whenever your in a dangerously loud enviormnet. My t is sort of like the sounds of shots firing off this to can be habituated I have a few tones. I think your t will settle down a bit the anxiety will make worse. If it settles to baseline again please use earplugs ear damage is cumulative.

 

I had a two year period of BAD T increase after foolishly playing loud music one night. Two years!!!
I don't think you can keep getting exposed to high volume and expect your T will settle down, or that you'll 'habituate.'
I've been playing with fire for over 40 years. Tinnitus is cumulative, mine is anyway. Picks right up where it left off.
Beware, earplugs don't always give you the protection you need. And don't always count on habituation.

 

Shit shit, it's not getting better.. the baseline seems to be getting sharper in it's character and the "firings" even more frantic. And worst of all, yesterday I noticed a faint 400Hz-ish tone in my right ear. It's very low, but it was still there this morning and still is, making me even more stressed out. Dunno why I'm writing this here.. just need some hope and understanding I guess.

Getting a professional back and neck massage tomorrow. Hopefully it will help to ease this horrible spike.